大象传媒

I was coming up for my eighteenth birthday when war was declared. I remember when Chamberlain said we were at war with Germany. A couple of days before that, my mother and younger brothers and sisters had been evacuated from London with the schools. But I stayed at home with my father because I was at work and too old to be evacuated.

I worked in the city of London and after a few months, I changed jobs and went to work for the Ministry of Information at the University of London Senot House in Russell Square. I used to travel up there each day and it was mainly concerned with censorship. We had to work to a shift pattern because it was a twenty-four operation.

I never had anything to do with the actual censorship, just carried out the instructions and we used to work on three different shifts, either, eight until four or four until eleven or eleven until eight in the morning.

Only the men did the eleven to eight in the morning shifts. This consisted of different items of news that would come to the Ministry and go to the various authorities and experts who decide if it were an item of news that could be released to the public or could be censored and kept secret.

And I used to be very concerned for the censors and the people who actually received the items of news. I was working there, when my eldest brother who was at Dunkirk at the time and who was in the Air Force and fighting in a two seater plane. Towards the end of the war my other brother who had been hoping to go into the Navy because he was a Sea Cadet - but when his turn for call up came, it was decided they didn鈥檛 want anymore in the Navy so unfortunately he had to go into the Army - and he was not very happy about it. So he did his war service and then got out as quickly as possible.

Apart from that, whilst I was with my father during the 1940鈥檚 - when we had all the bombing, we got bombed at the house, but we were just one of thousands really. I was very fortunate because most of my friends survived the war. For one reason or another they were not sent to the front line or North Africa or anything like that. A lot of them were either too young or too old, so they were very lucky.

Distant friends I remember losing but not close connections, but I always consider I came through the war quite lightly.

I became quite ill during the war and so spent a lot of time in hospital and mostly due to the war. It has affected the rest of my life really because I have never been a hundred per cent strong since.

My brother who was in the Air Force, I am afraid to say, war took quite a toll on him and he died a few years ago - and of course my parents have long since gone - but war affected everybody really. You were short of things you wanted to have and had to make do, even pretend to enjoy what you were eating, which most of the time was pretty horrible. It was just a time when you just existed really.

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